by Roy Lewis
‘Running Rein,’ he said.
‘And the man who paid you to organize this?’
Smith’s reply rasped nervously in the night air. ‘It was Sam McGuire,’ he said. ‘It was he who organized everything. He came to the stables late Saturday night and told me to hand the colt over to the horse-coopers when they arrived on Sunday. Then I was to help them later, with the interment here in this field. I was just getting paid to help, and keep my mouth shut.’ He shivered, looked about him in the silent clearing. ‘But no one told me anything about murder….’
Gully looked at me and nodded. As he ordered the navigators to shovel earth back over the half-destroyed corpse I turned away, made my way back to our carriage. So we had half the story now. The final answers would now have to come to us from the colt’s trainer.
Sam McGuire.
2
I would never claim to be a courageous man. Foolhardy on occasions, yes. There was that bouncing cannonball in the field outside Salerno, for instance: I outpaced my companions to the shelter of the ruined stone wall on that occasion, I can tell you, even though I’ve never been built for running. Garibaldi strolled back, insouciant, but he was a brave man. Of course I entertained more than a few ladies back in London afterwards with my account of life under fire, and I fear I exaggerated for their benefit, boasting about my exploits in Italy on the campaign that summer of ’61. But courageous, never … except in the courtroom.
So why did I go with Ben Gully a few days following our gruesome discovery? He tried to dissuade me, told me it could be dangerous, but I was all fired up, you see. The fraud over Running Rein, the betrayal by Cockburn, the sneers and malevolent threats of Bentinck, the stinging smarts delivered by Baron Alderson, Inspector Redfern’s suspicions, they all combined to stoke in me a desire and determination to be in at the kill, so to speak. I wanted to be with Ben when he finally faced McGuire, and got the truth out of him about the whole affair.
The long summer drought had broken and the Long Vacation had begun. That late afternoon, when Gully had agreed we should meet, the sky was sullen and bruised with dark-grey clouds piling up from the west. It had rained for two nights and there had been no need to dampen down the dust in the London streets. Many solicitors had fled the City at end of term and most of my colleagues at the Bar – the successful ones at least – had similarly decamped. I had no briefs to detain me and creditors to avoid so I was not averse to joining Ben in his hunt for the man who could give us the answers we sought.
Bentinck. I was certain it had been Bentinck who had paid Sam McGuire to get rid of the colt once the judge had called for its appearance in court. He had known his reputation was at stake, and he had deemed it better to spirit away the animal rather than face further humiliation in court. But why did Bartle have to die? Had it simply been because he had refused to take part in the plot, or had striven to prevent the abduction? Had Bentinck planned for the man to be beaten to death, or had it been unforeseen?
I had to know. I was determined to see things through to the end. And I insisted on accompanying Gully when he told me he had tracked down Sam McGuire to his lair.
There was a hint of further rain in the air when I made my way from my chambers at the Inner Temple, through the Temple Gardens and along towards Charing Cross. Traffic on the river was busy as usual but the low mist that was creeping up the river-banks from Blackfriars obscured some of the shipping and the deep discordant sounds of fog horns formed a mournful echoing backdrop to the clatter and clangs of the Strand.
The hansom cab was waiting under the arch of the bridge: Ben Gully was standing beside it, wrapped in a long, dark, volumi-nous-pocketed greatcoat. He was bareheaded, but had a scarf drawn high up to his chin. He nodded and raised a gnarled hand as I approached and stepped aside to allow me to enter the cab. The jarvey touched the brim of his hat and, once we were settled inside the hansom, closed the door, flicked his whip and the cab lurched and rattled its way from Charing Cross along the narrow cobbled road away from the city.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘The docks.’
Ben Gully was silent for a little while, leaning back in his seat and watching the passing traffic as we made our way past Blackfriars and into Thames Street, with the old wharfs perched on the riverside to our right. Then he glanced at me and said, ‘Waste of fine horseflesh.’
‘What do you mean?’
Gully’s eyes were hard. ‘I went back to that field. I took a vet name of Spurgeon to take a look at the skull and teeth of the horse we dug up. Just to satisfy my own mind: I don’t trust that weasel Smith, scared though he might be. The veterinary surgeon confirmed what Lord George Bentinck suspected all along. The horse that won the Derby was a ringer all right: Running Rein was a four year old. Mr Wood was gulled.’
‘We all were,’ I snapped angrily. ‘So how was the fraud practised?’
Gully shrugged. ‘The way I’ve been able to put it together, it seems the fraud started in Ireland with a horse called Maccabeus. It was entered in a few races with some success, under this trainer called Sam McGuire. Then Goodman bought it, shipped it across here and masqueraded it as Running Rein. It was held back of course, by obliging jockeys, so that its record was not great. But it was a four year old, not a two year old, and so not eligible for the Derby.’ He grunted, contemptuously. ‘Goodman spread a lot of money around on bets, but he was too fly to enter the animal himself – he sold it to Ernest Wood.’
‘Our enthusiastic but gullible corn merchant.’ I frowned thoughtfully. ‘But where did you get this confirmation of our suspicions?’
Gully grinned maliciously. ‘There are ways. I had another long session with Cornelius Smith after you left. Scared the life out of him. I suspected all along he knew more than he was letting on. The thought of being implicated in murder, rather than mere Turf fraud, made him clack like a fox-run hen coop about the nag, but he was still holding back. I had to show him a bit of muscle. He finally told me what he knew about the disappearance of Joe Bartle.’
‘So what happened?’ I gritted.
Gully shook his head, leaned back in his seat. ‘After he’d lost a few teeth he swore he couldn’t tell me exactly how it came about, and I think he’s telling that straight enough. But his story is that Bartle had got very moody. The stablehand was employed by Wood but must have had an idea about what was going on. Maybe it was the thought of the fraud and his part in it, or the anxiety of a court appearance, maybe not. Smith couldn’t tell. Then on the Wednesday Smith saw him talking with McGuire, the Irishman who originally trained Running Rein, or Maccabeus, or whatever the damned animal was called.’
Gully peered out through the dingy, smeared window of the hansom, noting our progress as we headed for Tower Hill. ‘So it’s true enough that it was on the Wednesday that Smith last cast his eyes on Bartle, though he heard he turned up that weekend at the Porky Clark fight on the Heath.’
Where he had been involved in some kind of altercation, it seemed. ‘That takes us no further forward.’
Gully shrugged. ‘Maybe no – but it was the next bit that interested me. Smith finally admitted to me that one of the men who took the horse was Porky Clark.’
‘The prize fighter? But what’s his part in all this?’
‘He’s known to be in the pay of Lewis Goodman. So maybe it was Goodman, not Bentinck who ordered the taking of the animal after Baron Alderson demanded it be brought to court. Goodman wouldn’t want his fraud to be discovered in court.’
‘So was it Clark who persuaded Smith to release the horse?’
‘No. He didn’t do the talking to Smith. He was just present when the coopers arrived. Looking after his master’s interest, I would imagine. No, the removal was achieved by Sam McGuire.’
‘At the hearing in the Exchequer Court we were informed that McGuire had returned to Ireland, and was not available as a witness,’ I muttered.
‘He never did. Though he wasn’t around when they buried the h
orse at Barling’s Meadow.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘Porky Clark and Lewis Goodman—’
‘I told you,’ Gully said with a hint of impatience. ‘He’s Lewis Goodman’s minder. A sporting man, our night-house owner, he likes to go to the prize fights, and likes to have a prizefighter at his back. Slow-witted Porky Clark might be, and too fond of the drink, but he’s loyal to Goodman because he gets paid well.’
I was silent for a while. We had found a clear link now between the spiriting away of the horse and Lewis Goodman, but the chances of ever getting Smith or Clark to speak up in court was slim. Clark was loyal; Smith might be scared by Gully, but he was likely to be more scared by Goodman if it ever came to the starting line.
Almost as though he had read my thoughts, Gully said quietly, ‘The key is Sam McGuire. He’s lying low. He’ll know all about the swindle Goodman was perpetrating – but I’ll bet my last shilling that he knows what happened to Bartle, and why. And that’s where Goodman’s web will start to fall apart. A horse racing fraud is one thing: murder is another. So, we need to know what McGuire quarrelled with Bartle about – and why Bartle had to die.’
‘To keep him quiet about the fraud?’ I pondered.
‘Who knows? The important thing is I think it’s McGuire who’ll be able to tell us. Moreover, maybe he’ll be willing to tell us.’
‘Why?’ I asked, puzzled.
Gully was quiet for a little while. He peered out of the cab again, issued some further instructions to the jarvey, and then faced me. ‘Because we ain’t the only ones looking for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ben Gully sucked at his teeth thoughtfully. ‘The word out on the streets is that Goodman’s looking for him too.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I, not yet. Maybe it’s to give McGuire the same medicine that was doled out to Joseph Bartle, now deceased.’
‘But why?’
‘That’s what we’ll try to find out.’
Thereafter, locked in our own thoughts, we rattled on our way in silence towards Wapping Pier Head.
You’ll know the London Dock area as well as any, I suppose, being a man of the sea – you’ll be aware of the way it sprawls over St George in the East, Shadwell and Wapping with its conglomeration of shops and dwellings, narrow streets and low lodging houses, where the dock labourers, sack makers, watermen and whores live packed together in close proximity. Most of the streets boasted a maritime character in those days; the shops were stocked with quadrants and sextants, chronometers and compasses, marine items of all conceivable description, and the cabs and wagons that trundled noisily along their cobbles carried ropes and lines smelling of tar, yellow bins of sulphur or copper ore, and casks of wine. At the corners of the streets were the slopsellers hawking their red and blue flannel shirts, hammocks and well oiled norwesters. And over it all loomed a forest of masts, coloured flags and bunting faded with age and smoke, against a belching line of steam-packet funnels, and the black hulls of massive colliers, tied up at the quayside, their decks lurching and rolling on the tide, twenty feet below the quay from the heavy cargoes in their holds. Changed a lot since then, I suppose, but I’ve not been down there in a while, so you’ll know better.
Anyway, Gully paid off the hansom cab at Tench Street and led the way into the maelstrom of humanity that whirled around the St George docks. We shouldered our way past gaugers with their long brass-tipped rules, sailors chattering in foreign tongues, butchers, cabbage sellers, piled casks of wine and stacks of cork on the greasy cobbles of the quayside.
We turned down a side alley where the air was pungent with the mingled odours of tobacco and rum, overlaid with the sickening stench of stacked hides. Gully suggested I should wait, standing with my back to the wall, while he entered the warehouse with its long line of lights, oil lamps flickering against the gloom of the sugar-sticky vaults.
I can still remember how, in the distance behind us, at some tavern, the sound of boisterous singing came to me against a jumble of dock sounds: a cooper hammering at casks on the quay, a hurdy gurdy playing for pennies, the rattling of chains flying up from the dark waters of the river, the thunder of empty drums being rolled along the quayside. But my back was cold; I shivered with apprehension. The light was dying about the docks now, and the lamps were being lit, but the fog had advanced up the river, snaking its tendrils through the alleyways and courtyards, and the effect was to cast a gloomy murk about the streets, heavy with the peculiar smell of dry rot.
Gully came back out of the warehouse. He had not told me how he had managed to trace the whereabouts of Sam McGuire but his web of contacts and informers stretched throughout the alleys and docks of old London. I caught a glimpse of a pale-faced urchin who skittered away into the depths of the building. One of Gully’s informants, I guessed.
‘Right, let’s go. Our friend’s at home, it seems.’ Gully hesitated, stood squarely in front of me, squinted at me in the gathering gloom. ‘You sure you want to be in on this business, Mr James?’
‘I’m sure.’
We went forward. There were women in the streets now, bare-armed and lacking bonnets or caps, and the public houses were opening their doors to bustling sailors seeking grog among a medley of men in greasy sporting jackets, surtouts burst at the elbows, a mockery of gentility with the collars of their paletots worn through to the canvas. Gully turned left into a narrow court: some Irish dock labourers were lolling there, smoking their pipes. They said nothing as we pushed past them, but there was a certain truculence in their bearing as they observed us which made the hairs on the back of my neck rise and tingle. Clothes lines hung across the rubbish-strewn court, festooned with limp, dirty-grey washing and women and men sat at the doorsteps of the narrow houses, smoking and drinking. At the end of the court was an open yard: two costermongers’s carts stood at its centre with their shafts up in the air. Beyond the yard was a tall pair of green gates, half open. Gully gestured with his right hand, and led the way to the house beyond.
It had once been a house with a certain grandeur, perhaps a merchant’s house overlooking the river, but its small garden was now littered with refuse, and the building itself was in a sad state of disrepair, long since given up to lodging house keepers. I guessed that it would now be a haven for the penurious, the drunk and the vicious. We entered through an open kitchen door. The kitchen itself was full of smoke and the fireplace of the chimney stood out from the brick wall, belching fumes into the room. The floor was unboarded and a wooden seat projected from the wall all around the room. There was one bewhiskered old man in the room: dressed in ancient knee breeches and a soiled red plush waistcoat he was seated on the bench with a bottle of ale in his hand. Gully stared at him, and the man stared back, unflinchingly. Gully put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small heavy bag, tossed it to the man who caught it deftly. He stared at Gully, jerked his head in the direction of the stairs, and without a word rose and left the room.
‘Upstairs, but quiet,’ Gully warned.
The naked boards creaked and groaned as we ascended, but from one of the rooms above there was the sound of a man and a woman singing a drunken chorus: it was sufficient to mask the sounds of our progress. Gully paused at the head of the stairs: the corridor was dimly lit by a single oil lamp hanging above the stairwell and there were four doors either side of the corridor. Gully pointed to the last on the left. He had obviously been well primed by his informants.
We walked quietly to the door, Gully leading. He tried the latch: it lifted, but the door did not move. Gully wasted no time on ceremony: he stepped back, drew something from the deep pockets of his coat and with one thunderous kick burst the door off its hinges.
There was a shouted obscenity as Gully threw himself into the room. When I followed a moment later it was to see Gully pinning a struggling man against the wall beside a rumpled bed. Gully had a pistol in his hand. He thrust the muzzle under the man’s chin, and in a
moment the struggling ceased.
‘Hello, Sam,’ Gully growled. ‘Come down in the world, ain’t you? Not the most salubrious surroundings, down here at the docks. But useful for a man on the run.’
Sam McGuire was a short, thickset man with cropped hair and a surly countenance. His skin was tanned but pock-marked and his shoulders were muscular, his chest deep. He would probably have given Gully a run for his money had it not been for the pistol. Now, in the light of the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling he sat tensely on the edge of the bed, his coarse shirt torn, and the dark stubble on his heavy features lending an almost demoniac grimness to his appearance. His broad hands, well used to rubbing down horses, hung between his knees but the thick fingers were curled menacingly, and the muscles of his shoulders were bunched as though he was ready at any moment to hurl himself at Gully, should the opportunity present itself. I leaned against the door jamb, watching, trying to quell the excited thunder in my chest as Gully thrust the muzzle of the horse pistol playfully against McGuire’s chin.
McGuire did not lack courage. He found his voice. ‘Who are you?’ the horse trainer growled. ‘What d’ye want with me?’
‘The benefit of a little conversation with you, Sam, that’s all.’
‘What about?’ McGuire turned his head, glared at me standing in the doorway. ‘If there wasn’t two of you—’
‘Oh, don’t pay mind to the gentleman there, Sam, it’s me you got to talk to, and don’t think I’m not man enough to put out your lights if you try to cause me any trouble.’
There was a short silence. ‘How did you find me?’ McGuire asked at last, in a rasping tone.
Gully sighed theatrically. ‘That’s the trouble with this world, Sam. There’s always a way to solve a problem, if you got the tin. Now you paid well over the odds to get this cosy little berth, didn’t you – where you thought you’d be safe from Goodman and Porky Clark? But you couldn’t be safe from me, Sam me lad – I got the contacts and connections, and I got the tin.’